![american conquest books american conquest books](https://static.mfah.com/images/craft-an-american-history-glenn-adamson.14170113365134848170.jpg)
Filipino social scientists have entered the fray since the 1920s, but exponentially more so following independence in 1946, contributing an important indigenous perspective that had been absent from previous erudition.
![american conquest books american conquest books](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/619TBJ2Q57L._AC_.jpg)
Beginning in the early 20th century, scholars from the United States in various disciplines began writing their own interpretations of the colonial period that preceded the half-century of American occupation. From that time, traditional scholarship on the Philippines tended to be Iberian-centered narratives flowing unidirectionally from Madrid/Cadíz to Mexico City/Acapulco to Manila and presenting nationally biased and commodity-centered analyses, penned by academics in Spain and Mexico. Before the word “globalization” became a ubiquitous catchphrase in the late 20th century, the Manila Galleon, Amoy, Malay, and Portuguese trade routes converged on Manila, uniting Europe, the Americas, East/South/Southeast Asia, and Africa through maritime commerce across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans in the late 16th century. Manila became both a battleground and mixing pot for Asian, Malay/Austronesian, and Iberian/Mexican peoples, religious beliefs, political institutions, technologies, and cultivated crops and domesticated animals, to name but a few of the exchanges that occurred over the three centuries of Spanish dominion. Most notable were that the archipelago was located in Asia, it consisted of many islands inhabited by a variety of Malay and Austronesian peoples, and Chinese cultural and economic influences, which had been developing since at least the Tang dynasty, competed with Castilian/Mexican. Miguel López de Legazpi’s (b. 1502–d. 1572) conquest of Manila in 1571 ushered in a 327-year epoch of Castilian rule in the Philippine Islands, but his actions also created unintended historical by-products that made the undertaking dissimilar to any other colony in the Spanish empire.